Older blog entries for ischmidt (starting at number 5)

Woo. I got some XingDVD tips from the ultracool Marcus. For the benefit of all you Wine alcoholics out there, here they are:

- Make sure you have r/w access to /dev/sgX (where the SCSI DVD ROM is attached).
- Start X in either 8 or 15 bit Mode.
- Start Xing with:
wine XingDVD.exe -desktop 800x600
- Press Play.

In other news, saw X-Men this weekend, and I'd like to say it completely rocks. The characters, plot, and even overall "feel" of the film are faithful to the comics. Plus it's just plain good entertainment. If you haven't seen it yet (and it's showing in your area, sorry my European friends :) GO!

Yikes. Long long time no post. Projects are coming to a close at work, so I sent in a new (and probably useless right now) Wine patch - it supports some of the new instructions on the Pentium Pro and later CPUs.

I must figure out how to get XingDVD to work on Wine - I get a window with no controls in it and when I click where Play should be it says it can't find the DVD. The LiViD stuff desyncs rather badly in the opposite direction now that I've upgraded from a 400 to an 866 :-)

I posted MTPng 4.2a on the site, for those who didn't notice ;)

In other news: I successfully installed Debian potato on hemispheres, my Official Experimental Box (it's a dual PPro 200 with 128 megs of RAM that I rescued from a fate in the dumpster at work :) Unfortunately, although I made it through dselect alive this time (it had been my nemesis on all previous install attempts), I couldn't figure out after installing all the KDE packages how to make KDE the default window manager. I think this is why my two "production" machines (force-ten and cygnusx1) are Redhat all the way ;-)

It's amazingly busy at work from here on through July probably. Wheeeeee :-)

I promise, there will be a new MTPng release soon. I've got 2 things I'm trying to do before then:

• Separate the OSS backend from the mixer core
• Write an ALSA native backend, since that's the drivers I run for "production" now.

I'm looking forward to seeing Gav's take on open source vs. traditional economics. It's a subject I've discussed a lot with some friends at work recently. We all more or less agree with the principles of Professor Eben Moglen's Anarchism Triumphant, but as well-paid toilers on traditional closed source software we're still wondering how people make money in the Brave New Economy. I know about indirect effects - Linus of course has his international man-of-mystery job as a direct result of some 386 operating system he wrote for free, and I know about things like CoSource, but doubts remain.

I guess that's why I'm a programmer not an economist ;-)

Whee. Long time no post. Anyway, I've discovered that the noise reduction feature in that last version of MTPng actually causes more noise than it removes (oops). I should have a fix out soon in case it's not obvious what to #if 0 out :)

Found the original MODs by SLL that became the famous SoundSmith SLL4 and SLL8 tunes. They're pitched a bit differently than the better-known (to me) SoundSmith versions - perhaps H. Aalbers messed up the conversions. OTOH, other MODs I have of FUN.MUSIC songs are identical (Cambodia for instance). Weird all around.

On the WINE front, I submitted a patch that implements the DOS INT21h/73xx calls that Internet Explorer 5.0 makes on Win9x (yikes). This eliminates a major source of FIXME messages in that program. Alexandre's now accepted it into CVS, so you'll get it if you're up to date. Still on the WINE plate: Some DirectX7 DirectDraw stuff. I need to write a test app less complicated than The Sims first though ;-)

I've posted a new version of MTPng on my website. This features in-progress support for the modified SMUS format used by Will Harvey in at least 2 of his IIgs games, as well as some structural cleanup to make adding more formats much easier.